Neo-Confucianism

Neo-Confucianism is the name Western scholars give to the great revival and transformation of Confucian thought that began in the Song dynasty (960–1279) and dominated Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese intellectual life until the twentieth century. For a thousand years after the Han, Confucianism had been chiefly a tradition of ritual, scholarship and statecraft, while the deepest metaphysical and spiritual questions were answered by Buddhism and Daoism. The Neo-Confucians — called in Chinese the “Learning of the Way” (dàoxué) or “Learning of Principle” (lǐxué) — set out to give Confucian ethics a metaphysical foundation of its own, absorbing Buddhist and Daoist ideas while rejecting their withdrawal from family and society. Their great synthesiser, Zhu Xi, made his interpretation of the Four Books the basis of the imperial examinations from 1313 to 1905; his great critic, Wang Yangming, founded a rival “Learning of the Heart-Mind”.

The Song masters

Five eleventh-century thinkers laid the foundations:

• Zhou Dunyi (1017–1073), whose Explanation of the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate described how the Supreme Ultimate (tàijí) — “the Ultimate of Non-being and also the Supreme Ultimate” — generates yin and yang, the five phases and the myriad things.
• Shao Yong (1011–1077), a numerological cosmologist of the Book of Changes.
• Zhang Zai (1020–1077), who held that all things are condensations and dispersals of qì, and whose “Western Inscription” began: “Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother… All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions.”
• The brothers Cheng Hao (1032–1085) and Cheng Yi (1033–1107), who made lǐ — principle, pattern, the reason why things are as they are — the central concept. Cheng Yi taught that “principle is one, but its manifestations are many”, and that one must “investigate things” to know principle; Cheng Hao that “the humane person forms one body with Heaven, Earth and all things”.

Zhu Xi’s synthesis

Zhu Xi (1130–1200) united these ideas into a system. Everything is composed of qì, the energy-stuff whose clear and turbid forms account for the differences of things, and is ordered by lǐ, its principle. The Supreme Ultimate is the totality of principle, present whole in each thing, “as the moon is reflected in ten thousand streams”. Human nature is principle, and therefore good, as Mencius taught; but each person’s endowment of qì is more or less clear or turbid, and selfish desires obscure the nature. Self-cultivation requires both reverent attention (jìng) and the investigation of things (gé wù) to extend knowledge — studying the classics, history and the principles of things one by one, until, after long effort, one achieves a sudden “thorough penetration” of the one principle in all.

Zhu Xi chose the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean as the Four Books, the core of Confucian education, and wrote commentaries on them that became orthodoxy.

The Learning of the Heart-Mind

Zhu Xi’s contemporary Lu Xiangshan (1139–1193) objected that principle is not to be sought outside, in things, but within: “the universe is my mind, and my mind is the universe”. Three centuries later, Wang Yangming (1472–1529) developed this into the “Learning of the Heart-Mind” (xīnxué): “the mind is principle”; everyone possesses innate knowledge of the good (liángzhī); and knowledge and action are one. Wang’s school became immensely influential in Ming China and in Japan (as Yōmeigaku), where it inspired reformers of the Meiji Restoration.

Spread and critics

Neo-Confucianism became the state ideology of the Joseon dynasty in Korea (1392–1910), where scholars like Yi Hwang (Toegye) and Yi I (Yulgok) debated the relation of principle and qì with great subtlety; and of Tokugawa Japan. In Qing China, critics such as Dai Zhen (1724–1777) attacked the Song philosophers for using “principle” to suppress human desires — “when people die under the law, there are those who pity them; when they die under principle, who pities them?” In the twentieth century, the New Confucians — Xiong Shili, Mou Zongsan, Tang Junyi — revived Neo-Confucian thought in dialogue with Kant and Hegel.

In conversation

• Principle and qì — the pattern and the stuff of all things.
• The moon in ten thousand streams — the one principle in many things.
• “All people are my brothers and sisters” — Zhang Zai’s Western Inscription.